One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years ...
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One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, the book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material not previously published. It brings together intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. The book provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, it discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. The book then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius.Less

Charles Stanish

Published in print: 2003-03-12

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, the book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material not previously published. It brings together intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. The book provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, it discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. The book then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius.

This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the ...
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This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.Less

Becoming Mapuche : Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile

Magnus Course

Published in print: 2011-11-15

This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.

This book offers a depth of ethnographic work that makes the following theoretical interventions: (a) to emphasize the significance of Brazil in the formation of the African Diaspora with specific ...
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This book offers a depth of ethnographic work that makes the following theoretical interventions: (a) to emphasize the significance of Brazil in the formation of the African Diaspora with specific attention to black women as social and political agents; (b) to highlight the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts oftentimes represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt; and (c) to offer a corrective perspective on how we think about politics by focusing on grassroots social movements in neighborhoods as key sites of struggle. The book describes in great detail the neighborhood association in Gamboa de Baixo located on the coast in the city-center of the northeastern city of Salvador. Local activists have been key in the city-wide movement for land and housing rights, and the geographic location of the neighborhood is crucial for understanding the gendered racial aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. It makes connections between the local, national and international politics of race, gender and the modernization of global cities and provides an example of the kinds of resistance movements that have emerged as a result.Less

Black Women against the Land Grab : The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

Published in print: 2013-10-01

This book offers a depth of ethnographic work that makes the following theoretical interventions: (a) to emphasize the significance of Brazil in the formation of the African Diaspora with specific attention to black women as social and political agents; (b) to highlight the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts oftentimes represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt; and (c) to offer a corrective perspective on how we think about politics by focusing on grassroots social movements in neighborhoods as key sites of struggle. The book describes in great detail the neighborhood association in Gamboa de Baixo located on the coast in the city-center of the northeastern city of Salvador. Local activists have been key in the city-wide movement for land and housing rights, and the geographic location of the neighborhood is crucial for understanding the gendered racial aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. It makes connections between the local, national and international politics of race, gender and the modernization of global cities and provides an example of the kinds of resistance movements that have emerged as a result.

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book ...
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Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.Less

Karl Zimmerer

Published in print: 1997-01-29

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.

For two years, fieldwork was carried out in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of ...
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For two years, fieldwork was carried out in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. This book tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts. Citizens’ media are most effective, the book posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. The book demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects. Ultimately, the book shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.Less

Clemencia Rodríguez

Published in print: 2011-10-12

For two years, fieldwork was carried out in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. This book tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts. Citizens’ media are most effective, the book posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. The book demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects. Ultimately, the book shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.

In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori's increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the ...
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In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori's increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city's cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. In this book, the author employs an interweaving of essays and field diary entries as she analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city's conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas's writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—this book is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.Less

The City at Its Limits : Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima

Daniella Gandolfo

Published in print: 2009-07-15

In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori's increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city's cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. In this book, the author employs an interweaving of essays and field diary entries as she analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city's conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas's writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—this book is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.

Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group ...
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Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. This book explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. It pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, the book shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This book challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil's Protestants, provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country's struggle to combat racism.Less

The Color of Sound : Race, Religion, and Music in Brazil

John Burdick

Published in print: 2013-01-07

Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. This book explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. It pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, the book shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This book challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil's Protestants, provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country's struggle to combat racism.

This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the ...
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This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. The book includes analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas—as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. It presents an approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that aims to illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond.Less

Converting Words : Maya in the Age of the Cross

William Hanks

Published in print: 2010-03-17

This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. The book includes analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas—as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. It presents an approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that aims to illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond.

This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through ...
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This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter. This work is a new chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements, chronicling the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.Less

Cultures in Conflict : Social Movements and the State in Peru

Susan Stokes

Published in print: 1995-05-01

This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter. This work is a new chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements, chronicling the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.

Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope ...
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Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.Less

Dancing Jacobins

Rafael Sánchez

Published in print: 2016-04-28

Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.